Christopher J Johnson selects Please Return Polaroid by Miles Aldridge from Steidl Verlag as Book of the Week.

"I’m a longtime fan of Miles Aldridge’s work. He is an inheritor of the style of Guy Bourdin with all Bourdin’s penchant for cinematic-style fashion photography mixed together with something like garishness. Aldridge doesn’t just do a fashion shoot of dirty blondes on the beach, but rather he creates entire scenes and then presents them in his trademark style that many have termed, “candy-hued.”

If Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut were a photobook rather than a novel, Miles Aldridge would be its author. He presents an over idealized world fraught with human sloppiness, the occasional scraped knee and all the spilled caviar and jam you could spill in a lifetime.

Please Return Polaroid is unlike any other Aldridge book I’ve seen; it presents his studies and process Polaroid photographs. Aldridge tries to take several Polaroid pictures of all of his fashion shoots and to create from them a document of his work in progress. What results, in book form, is a first look at many of Miles Aldridge’s most famous photographs: we see sets as they develop, the whole crew putting together a scene and a moment here and there where Aldridge has stepped outside onto the street to take a breath of air.

If you like Aldridge’s work or are more simply someone interested in fashion photography I can’t think of a book that I would recommend more highly than Please Return Polaroid; that being said, like a David Lynch movie, this work is not for everyone — take a look, decide for yourself; are you a Miles Aldridge fan? And, if you like the work and want to see it in its finalized form I recommend I Only Want You To Love Me, Aldridge’s previous publication available from through photo-eye from Rizzoli." — Christopher J Johnson

Christopher J Johnson lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is a resident writer for the Meow Wolf art collective. His first book of poetry, &luckier, has been released by the University of Colorado. He is Manager of photo-eye’s Book Division.